Challenging Motorism in New York City

Abstract

Public contention over recent changes in New York City’s streetscape, allocating more space and priority to pedestrians and cyclists, illuminates an underlying conflict between a belief system regarding motor vehicles as central to American life—the windshield-perspective assumptions here termed Motorism—and dissenting beliefs questioning the rationality of automotive monoculture. New York-based writer Bill Millard argues that during the twentieth century, Motorism attained a level of dominance thorough enough to be unrecognized and unquestioned in most locales; though it encounters enough opposition to be visible as an ideology only in a few places (particularly New York), its ill effects on the environment, the economy, health, and other values are increasingly apparent, suggesting that the New York “streetfight” has social ramifications extending well beyond New York.